


line of fire

by nadin



Category: WW84 - Fandom, Wonder Woman (Movies - Jenkins), Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Diana deserves to be happy, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, No Spoilers, Not Canon Compliant, Steve Trevor is real, WW84
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28422276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nadin/pseuds/nadin
Summary: She finds him in a snowstorm and when she does, he looks like a ghost. At first, Diana thinks that he is. He looks as lost as she feels, and she nearly walks past him, determined not to give in again. Not to chase another illusion. She has fallen for this trick of her mind a hundred times too many.His fingers brush against her wrist, warm and real.“Diana…” his voice slices through the air.WW84, reimagined. Spoiler-free
Relationships: Diana (Wonder Woman)/Steve Trevor
Comments: 55
Kudos: 210
Collections: oh YES





	line of fire

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this piece for the original WW84 premier and it's been sitting in my drafts for a while. But hey, better late than never, right? 
> 
> The title is from [this song by Junip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0ePYYASGtE&ab_channel=Junip-Topic) which is amazing. 
> 
> Also, happy holidays everyone! Whether you celebrate anything this time of year or not, I hope you are being safe and healthy and having a good time with your loved ones (even if it's happening through Zoom :P)

The nights scare Diana. Not the darkness or the creatures hiding in the shadows, but the stillness of her mind. The emptiness that allows her thoughts to wander. 

In her dreams, her sword snaps in half and her lasso burns right through her skin while the world crumbles around her and turns to dust. In her dreams, Steve Trevor dies over and over again, so close, and yet so far out of her reach. Diana watches the life drain out of him, his gaze locked with hers, glassy and unseeing, his body nothing but a shell. She’s too late; always too late.

In her dreams, her gods betray her and leave her to fend for herself, and no matter how much she pleads for their help, they turn their backs on her.

Fighting helps. It keeps her focused, keeps her mind sharp. Bringing peace, saving lives, doing what she was born and raised to do. It doesn’t fill the emptiness that the heartbreak has left behind, and it doesn’t help her scars heal, but it smooths out the sharp edges of her heartache, and she remembers to be grateful. It’s not always enough, but there are days when it has to be—

Diana charges at the creature that bares its teeth at her, her hand steady, her sword unyielding. She doesn’t want to hurt it, but it doesn’t belong here, and if she lets it leave, lets it have its way, it will hurt people, unable to fight its own nature. The worry stirs inside of her. This thing, this _being_ , doesn’t come from man’s world and it’s been a while since she saw anything that didn’t.

However, Diana doesn’t have time to wonder or hesitate. It’s about momentum and speed and knowing that no one else can do what she does. When the massive body crumples at her feet, she looks around, listening, waiting, but the sky above her remains black, the streets dark and quiet and still. She half-expects another attack, bracing herself for the impact but nothing comes. The stillness settles around her, and she is not sure if she is comforted or troubled by it.

Something’s changed. She can feel it in the air, in the pin-pricking of her skin. It’s not the rush of the fight that is making her heart beat faster, but try as she might, she can’t catch the end of the thread that keeps slipping out of her grasp. Something is different and it sets off her inner alarms for reasons she cannot see, making the fine hairs on her body stand on end.

She shakes her head and takes a breath, inhaling the cold night air, her blood pumping hot through her veins. 

This is not about her, Diana reminds herself. Her fingers curl around the hilt of her sword, its weight familiar and reassuring in her grip. This world is not hers, not completely, but she has sworn to protect it and remembering that calms her; her heartbeat steading in her chest. 

When she walks away, she pretends that she doesn’t notice the snow that has started to fall.

* * *

The first snow of the year hurts the most.

She learns to ignore it; has learned to look right past it a long time ago, pushing the memories that it brings up to the surface back where no one can find them. Not even Diana herself.

Steve Trevor is dead. He has been dead for 66 years, but she has yet to find her peace with it. Back in London, right after the war, she used to see him everywhere, hear his voice carry across crowds. She has expected the pain to fade and wither, but even now, decades later, she still hears his laughter when she least anticipates it. Hears him call out her name. She has followed strangers in a wild hope that maybe this time—

—she has muttered apologies and looked away before she could see the pity in eyes that often are not even blue. Walked away and shoved disappointment aside. It’s not like she expects him to come back. It’s not like she ever has.

The history of her people is stitched together from stories about great love that could move mountains and knock the stars down from the sky. They are woven into colourful patterns of passion and lust and revenge; the tales of devotion that transcends time, meant to exist for eternity. 

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, perhaps, that she would love as strongly and as deeply and as reverently as she does. It’s in her blood and in her heart and everything that she is.

Even so, it has caught Diana off-guard.

She wants the ache of her loss gone, but she is holding onto it with all her might, too, for she’s got nothing else left of him. There is nothing in this world or any other that terrifies her more than losing the last trace of Steve.

In the tales her mother has told her as a child, the gods often begged to have the weight of love or hatred or despair lifted off of them, looking for salvation from the burdens carried in their hearts.

Diana can’t imagine a curse more cruel. To her, to feel nothing is to be dead.

* * *

When Steve comes back, she knows she ought to have questions. She knows she will eventually, but not now. Not straight away. First, she will revel in the miraculous sensation that blossoms in the centre of her chest and spreads over her body until she feels that her heart might burst from the fullness of it; in the relief that that is so overwhelming that she can barely stand it.

She finds him in a snowstorm and when she does, he looks like a ghost. At first, Diana thinks that he is. He looks as lost as she feels, and she nearly brushes past him, determined not to give in again. Not to chase another illusion. She has fallen for this trick of her mind a hundred times too many.

His fingers brush against her wrist, warm and real.

“Diana…” his voice slices through the air.

She stops in her tracks as her heart slams hard against her ribs, her mind racing. The skin where he has touched her burns as though he scalded her. His eyes are as impossibly blue as she remembers, piercing and bright, and somewhat confused. They search her face, looking for answers to the questions he doesn’t know how to put into words.

He looks exactly as he did the last time she saw him, down to the faint stubble coating his cheeks and every last button and buckle of his stolen German uniform under his thick coat, and she feels like she has fallen through time.

When he reaches for her, when she moves into him, she doesn’t know if she is crying or if it is only the snow melting when it touches her skin.

“Steve.”

He cups her face with his hands, his smile soft and barely there, but it still makes something snap apart inside of her. “Hey.”

Later, the weather channel will say that Washington, D.C., has not seen a snowstorm so fierce in over a century. It doesn’t stop for days, bringing the spinning world to a halt. Like it’s trying to hide something. 

Diana doesn’t want to argue with it. Part of her wishes to remain forever hidden, too.

By the time they make it to her apartment, Steve is freezing, his cheeks flushed from the wind and his fingers as cold as icicles when she takes his hand. For a moment, she fears that this is what a ghost would feel like. But when he kisses her, heat sears right through her system as though she has been touched by fire. She can feel it in her blood, in every nerve and every cell of her body.

She pushes his heavy coat down his shoulders, her hands roaming over his chest, his shoulders, clutching at his hair, damp with the melting snow, as he pulls her flush against him. Her mind spirals away, and she lets it, happily so. All thoughts turn to ash when he touches her, when he breathes out her name, and she can’t seem to get close enough.

Diana gasps against his mouth when his fingers dig into her hips, almost painfully so, and she remembers—

She remembers it all.

“Shouldn’t that have happened first?” Steve asks her later, amused.

Sitting against the headboard of her bed, a sheet half draped over his lap, he watches her rummage through their clothes strewn all over the floor of her bedroom in the soft light of the reading lamp on the nightstand until she finds the Lasso of Hestia under the heap of his jacket.

Diana glances up, unable to bite back her own smile. “We were… otherwise occupied, no?” she counters, an eyebrow raised, and he laughs—with his whole face, the way she loves it.

The sound of it makes everything inside of her sing.

He is right—and he is not. She would never have let him into her home, would never have taken him to bed if she wasn’t sure. She knew who he was the second he touched her and from the way her body responded to it. Like it has been waiting for his return all along. The shock of it crazed through every crack in her soul, a reaction beyond her control. But she knows that they both need it, can see that he is not sure who and what he is, and she wants to put his mind at ease. Needs him to trust himself as much as he trusts her.

As an afterthought, Diana picks up his shirt from the floor and pulls it on, earning a wrinkled nose and a grunt of protest in response, pleased to have him distracted. The shirt smells like him and still carries the warmth of his body, and she loves the touch of it to her skin. 

“You didn’t have to do _that,”_ Steve points out with a huff.

She smirks and tries to ignore the way her chest constricts. Zeus, the way he looks at her….

She climbs back onto the bed and slides onto his lap, her thighs bracketing his. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and finds his eyes. Without a word, Steve offers his wrists to her, his gaze earnest, and a little concerned in the glow of the Lasso. He is not smiling anymore, his brows knitted together, and she barely resists the temptation to smooth that frown out with a kiss.

She watches his Adam’s apple bob in his throat when he swallows as she wraps the Lasso around his wrists, careful to keep it loose enough so as not to hurt him. He sucks in a breath when its touch starts to sting. She curls her hands over his.

“Steve.”

He looks up, and she feels his tightly clenched fists relax.

“I would never hurt you,” Diana whispers.

He nods. “I know. You can’t hurt anyone.”

His honesty, his steady assuredness makes her heart clench. Makes her smile, too. She has hurt people before, but never intentionally, never with purpose in her mind, and while he is not completely accurate, it means the world to her that it’s what he believes.

“Tell me—” she starts.

“My name is Captain Steve Trevor, pilot, American Expeditionary Forces. Serial number 814192,” he recites without hesitation, his eyes never leaving hers. Diana feels the familiar swell of affection building up in her chest, his voice bringing up the memories she has locked in the back of her mind, and it all comes rushing back like a tidal wave. “You saved me. And not just when you pulled me from the water when my plane crashed. You kept saving me every moment since I met you from—from someone the war would have turned me into otherwise.”

Diana’s pulse stutters in her veins.

“I have never loved anyone as much as I love you, Diana,” Steve continues, the words rushing out of his mouth before he can stop himself, and she sees that such openness terrifies him as much as it thrills him. “When I saw you cross No Man’s Land, I knew that I would have followed you to the edge of the Earth if you so wished.”

“What happened to you?” she asks quietly, her fingers flexing around his knuckles.

“I don’t know,” he shakes his head and she watches panic flare up in his eyes. “The plane exploded, and I was dead….” he falters, his brows pulling together in confusion. “And then I wasn’t.” 

He is searching for words within himself, but they never come, and his expression grows frantic.

“Steve…”

“And it scares me,” he adds quickly, his eyes flicking between hers. Diana feels him tighten his fists again. “Not knowing what happened to me _terrifies_ me because I don’t know what’s coming next. It terrifies me because there is nothing I’ve ever wanted more than this—you, us—since the night on the boat when you slept next to me under the stars, and I can’t bear the thought—” he cuts off when his breath hitches in his throat.

Diana unravels the Lasso, pulling it off his wrists, and lets it fall to the floor.

She brushes his hair back from his face and he leans into her hand, closing his eyes. (She hasn’t noticed how tense he’s been until he relaxes under her touch.) She watches his chest shudder with a shaky exhale.

“It’s been so long,” Steve murmurs, looking up at her again. “For you, it’s been forever.”

Still, his hands slide up her bare thighs and around her waist, palms moving up her back when she doesn’t stop him. She leans closer and rests her forehead against his. Her thumb traces along his jaw as she waits for her breathing to find itself again.

“For this, I’d wait a thousand years,” she whispers, feeling her lips tug upwards at the corners. “A thousand lifetimes, if I had to.”

“I love your smile,” he tells her, and she feels dizzy with tenderness. She doesn’t doubt that he is honest, but she likes that it is not the magic speaking.

Her hands frame his face and tilt it upward, her lips brushing to the corner of his. “You were right, we should have started with the Lasso.”

“Maybe we should start over,” Steve suggests, smiling back. It’s weak and only half-convincing, but the spark is there, and she wants it. All of it.

“Say it again,” she asks.

“I love you,” he repeats without hesitation. The same words that were tattooed into every inch of her skin not long ago. Just the thought of it makes desire come to life again, turning her blood into molten fire.

When he tugs at her shirt, Diana lifts her arms obediently and, forgoing buttons, he pulls it off over her head.

* * *

He is tense and wary, and if she is being honest with herself, Diana can’t blame him. She doesn’t want to show it but she is frightened too because Steve is right – the uncertainty feels like a shadow looming over them. One that has been easy to push away when they were drowning in one another and the world was bright with shimmering delight, and she forgot, for however short a time, what not having him was like.

She can feel it now, lurking in her peripheral vision, creeping in closer when she is not looking. Can feel the weight of it pressing down on them even through the hazy afterglow of the past few hours filled with laughter and passion and whispered confessions and words of love. And she vows silently to keep it at bay for as long as she can. For as long as it lets her.

For tonight, at least.

She can’t help but feel glad that he can’t see her face now. One look, and he would know her every thought, every feeling. He’s always been good at reading her, and even though she might have grown more closed off, more cautious with her emotions, she doubts that this is something she can hide. Not when it feels as raw as it does.

“I never noticed this one,” Diana says quietly, touching her fingers to the thin, faint line of a scar running from the base of Steve’s neck down toward his shoulder blade, pale and faded.

“Barbwire,” he says, turning his head a little to the side. “Bootcamp.”

Her clawfoot bathtub is a snug fit, but she doesn’t mind the proximity, revelling in his closeness, in the warmth of his body next to hers. Steve is sitting between her parted knees, the taut muscles of his back and shoulders rippling beneath his skin as she traces the map of them with the washcloth lathered up with soap.

She nods even though he can’t see it and wonders absently how many more stories are there, just under the surface and out of her reach. It strikes Diana then that she has known him for so long, and she still knows so little. 

And she is hungry for it. For every moment of his life that she hasn’t been a part of.

Diana rinses the washcloth and wipes the suds off his skin.

Steve is quiet. Has been quiet for a while now, and she is not surprised. She has told him the truth about where he is (Washington, D.C), and _when_ (1984), and about the war that they have put an end to, and another one that came and went without him knowing. The one that she had helped with but not before it had hurt people, good people who didn’t deserve it. She has told him about the little things in-between to make the picture whole.

It’s a lot to take in, and she doesn’t want to rush him. 

It’s a lot, but they have time now.

She chooses to ignore the small voice in the back of her mind that makes her doubt that. 

“Tell me something,” Steve asks, breaking the comfortable silence that has settled between them. 

“What?” Diana asks, unable to hold back her smile.

His shoulders roll in a half-shrug. “Something about you. Something you like.”

Her smile stretches out wider. She leaves the washcloth on the lip of the bathtub and moves closer to him, arms wrapping around his torso.

There were other people in her life that she cared about, other people whose touches meant something and who she let into her heart, yearning for love lost too soon, but her hands still remember the texture of his skin and the map of scars painted over his body. And the easiness with which she has slipped right back into the brief time that they have spent together is overwhelming.

“I thought I already did,” Diana whispers, pressing a lingering kiss to his shoulder.

The back of his neck turns red, his skin growing hot momentarily against hers, and she bites her lip so as not to laugh out loud. Still, when she looks at Steve, he is smiling. He glances at her over his shoulder and chuckles, shaking his head. His hand curls over her wrist and she feels his thumb trace slow circles over her knuckles.

“Something that doesn’t _necessarily_ require you to be naked,” he suggests.

Diana hums. “I would argue that a lot of those things would benefit from the absence of clothing,” she points out, pleased to hear his sharp inhale.

Still, he has relaxed against her, the tight knots in his muscles chased away by the warmth of the water and the easy banter, his mind elsewhere at last. His heartbeat is no longer as frantic as it was earlier, and she is pleased about that, too.

She brushes a kiss to the scar near his neck. His hair still smells like snow when she rests her forehead against the back of his head and breathes him in as she says a silent prayer of gratitude to whoever is listening.

“How about I show you?” she offers quietly, touching her fingers to his temple when he half-turns to her, skimming them down his cheek, the faint stubble prickly against her skin.

“I thought you already did.” Steve raises a suggestive eyebrow at her.

She laughs. “Some _other_ things,” she says.

He is quiet for a moment, like suddenly none of this is funny anymore, and Diana is acutely aware of the wheels in his head turning as faint lines appear between his brows.

“You’d do that?” he asks after a while, his voice cautious.

It occurs to her that he is not sure what to expect. She has loved him and missed him for decades but he doesn’t know that, doesn’t fully comprehend it. 

It gives Diana a pause. 

“Of course.” Her arms tighten around him and she kisses his shoulder again. “Yes, Steve. Of course, I would.”

“Alright,” he agrees after a brief consideration.

“Yes?” she clarifies as she watches his features relax.

“Yeah.” He nods. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

She wants to promise him that he doesn’t need to be worried, that there is nothing she won’t keep him safe from, but she has made that promise before. Sixty-six years ago, in a small room above the inn in Veld, she promised him that she would defeat the God of War and they would make their beautifully woven dreams come true. She only kept half of it, and hasn’t made another promise to anyone since.

She wants to, nonetheless. More than she ever has before.

He turns around as best he can, nearly splashing the cooling water to the floor as he does and sending Diana into a fit of giggles. The boyish grin that she loves so springs across his face. The one that makes him look younger, giving her a glimpse of the man he was before their paths crossed. She wants that man to come back; he deserves a second chance at a good life more than anyone she’s ever known. She catches his face between her hands, thumb brushing over his cheekbones as her eyes roam over his features.

It feels like a dream, the good kind.

“Will you sleep with me tonight?” she asks, watching his eyes grow dark.

His smile grows wider when he leans forward, his hand sliding around the back of her neck where her hair is gathered into a loose knot, tilting her face up. “Thought you’d never ask.”

* * *

Getting to know Steve Trevor anew is something that Diana never thought she’d get to experience. But now he is here, and it is nothing like what he has ever imagined. He is the same man she had met over half a century ago, but strikingly different, too.

There is a whole new quality to his smiles and the belly laugh that had no place to exist in the throes of the war. Things she would have known already if they’d met each other under different circumstances. Things that not even his friends were aware of because, close as they were, the war that tore the whole world apart wasn’t the place for soul searching and baring their hearts.

When she asks him why, he tells her that they all knew they were not likely to make it. To give too much of themselves away felt like scattering what little was already left. He tells her he would have given his life for Charlie, and Sameer, and Chief without thinking twice, but it was not the same as telling them what his favourite memory from his childhood was or what he missed the most from home.

“I look ridiculous,” he tells her, scrunching his nose and making a face when she takes him to get new clothes. The German uniform he’d been wearing when she found him was burned, a literal and metaphoric end to the time long gone.

She smooths her hands over his chest and looks up, smiling. “You look very stylish,” she tells him.

He clears his throat and looks away, as if suddenly interested in the unfamiliar design of his outfit. He is attractive and he knows it, but he is not used to being told that. Diana makes a mental note of it, affection pooling in her chest, taking up all the space in her ribcage.

When she slips her hand in his afterward as they leave the store, weaving their fingers together, he squeezes hers back. Of all the things he could have said or done, this is the last one she’d expect to make her love him even more. And yet—

She wakes up to the smell of coffee and eggs, and a sleepy smile that makes something snap and unravel inside of her as she watches him move around her kitchen. He is decidedly not a morning person, she thinks.

“G’morning,” Steve murmurs, his voice still scratchy with sleep when he leans in to kiss her briefly on the cheek and she doesn’t resist the urge to run her hand through his hair. “Breakfast?”

This, Diana decides, is why people go to war. This, right there, the contentment the likes of which she has never known before is the only thing worth fighting for. She doesn’t tell him that his coffee is pretty terrible, and that maybe he should leave it to her in the future. She tries not to think too hard about them having one because the delirious happiness of it is making her soul ache.

“What?” he asks when he catches her staring at him, and she doesn’t know how to explain that she has had this dream more times than she can recall. That on the night a long time ago, when the snow was falling and the light was dim and the people around them found peace in their hearts, he gave her a dream and a promise, and she had been chasing them ever since, never once believing that she will ever get to live them.

Diana smiles into her cup and sips her coffee. “Nothing.”

She can get used to this, she thinks. She can’t wait to get used to this.

But, by heavens, they will have to improve his coffee-making skills.

He steps into her life, her routines, and makes the time fall away, like those years that she has spent without him never happened. It’s easy and seamless, and in days, she can barely remember what it had been like without him.

But there are scars there, too. Thick tissue around his heart, protecting it like a shell, and Diana can’t fault him for it. She has seen enough to understand the moments when his eyes grow distant and his mind wanders where she can’t follow, and it’s not about wanting or trying – Hera help her, she knows he does – but about learning to be a whole different person in a world that makes no sense to him. Where the war has never stopped.

One night, a few days after his return, she wakes up to find Steve wide awake, eyes trained on the ceiling, tight lines framing his mouth. She can feel confusion and fear throbbing right through him, running thick in his veins.

“Are you alright?” she asks, her hand brushing his hair back from his face as she tries not to see the haunted panic in his eyes or the way his lips move for a moment like he is trying to say something but doesn’t know how.

In the end, Steve merely shakes his head. _It’s nothing_. He rolls over and tucks her into the curve of his body, drawing her closer. She can feel him relax against her, the warmth of his body smoothing out the jagged edges of her own fears.

“I love you,” he murmurs into her shoulder, and in minutes, he is asleep.

Diana stays awake, listening to him breathe until the early hours of the morning, and she says a quiet prayer to all gods she can think of.

 _Please don’t take him away from me again_.

* * *

Steve stares at the old, slightly matted face of his father’s watch, and it stares right back at him, barely changed after all this time. Still ticking, too. He studies it in amazement, a little more worn than he remembers. And all he can think of is the cold airfield and his hand closing over Diana’s, the roar of the wind and an _I love you_ he wasn’t certain she even heard.

(She will tell him later that she did. That there has been nothing that she’s held closer to her heart, and that not knowing to say it back before it was too late has been her biggest regret.

“Not anymore,” he murmurs, and the smile that blossoms across her face is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

She has said it more times than he can remember now, but he can never tire of hearing it. Not for a million years, perhaps.)

Steve traces his thumb along the leather strap of the watch, smooths it over the face, a little scratched from everything it’s been through.

“It’s—” he starts and falters. His throat closes up, suddenly tight with emotion.

He clears it as Diana moves closer to him. Her hand curls over his shoulder and she rests her chin on top of it as she studies the watch, too.

“You still have it,” Steve musters at last in a whoosh of breath.

“You gave it to me for safekeeping,” she reminds him, and he doesn’t correct her. Doesn’t want to remind himself that he meant it as a goodbye.

He closes his fist around the watch and turns to Diana, his free arm sliding around her as he ducks his head closer to her and rests their foreheads together.

“Thank you,” he says, although he is not certain what for – for keeping his watch, or for finding him, or for still loving him enough to want to give him another chance. He has yet to figure this out for himself.

He doesn’t remember. Doesn’t remember a single thing that has happened to him between the night that he died and the snowstorm, and in many ways, it makes it hard for him to catch his breath, stop looking over his shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Makes it hard to believe that any of this is real. For all he knows, time might have folded in on itself and decades of Diana’s life have been reduced to one moment of his.

Living on borrowed time, that’s what Chief used to call the war. Because nothing was under their control. Because every breath, every step could have been their last one. Steve feels like he is living on borrowed time now, waiting for something – someone – to take him away again. And it terrifies him to his bones. He can’t lose her again, never again. Not like this. 

It keeps his heart racing, keeps his mind reeling, keeps him awake for hours in the dead of night, even when his body is exhausted to the point of collapsing while Diana sleeps by his side. 

One would think that he has left the war behind, but even now, it keeps raging inside of him, violent as ever, so much so that at times, Diana’s touch burns as painfully as her Lasso. His body, his mind, feels like an exposed nerve and there is no getting away from it any more than he can get away from himself.

It pushes him out of the bed at the crack of dawn and he runs around the Lincoln Memorial, his feet pounding the frozen ground until his muscles burn and his shirt is soaked with sweat and he can’t feel the bite of the winter. It’s easier when he is too tired to think. It’s the only time when he doesn’t feel the invisible hand reaching out for him to snatch him away.

* * *

The world is different but not as much as Steve would have expected. The rules have changed some. The cars are faster, the clothes bolder. The bombs no longer fall from the sky. When Steve learns that they sent a man to the moon, it sounds to him like something out of a book. But people are the same. At the core, they haven’t changed one bit, still driven by love and passion and greed and revenge, and Steve doesn’t know if it comforts or unsettles him.

Doesn’t know if every war they put themselves through is for nothing seeing as how in the end, they always come back to right where they started. Now people carry those battles inside of them, and they let them destroy them where no one can stop it.

He knows better than to let his thoughts linger on this revelation, but he can hardly bring himself to push it away. His watch is ticking on his wrist, and he can’t help but feel that he is running out of time.

* * *

Being with Diana is easy. She is patient and endlessly kind, and there is nothing about her that doesn’t take his breath away. She still carries the light within her that has brought him to life once, and made him swear he’d be a better person in a world filled with violence and cruelty and despair.

The one worthy of her goodness.

It takes no effort for Steve to lose himself in her, irrevocably and completely. He might not remember what has happened to him or where he has been, if anywhere at all, but he knows with striking clarity that this is all he’s ever wanted. He cannot take away the pain that he has caused or fix the path that his death has set her on, but he can do that and hope that it will count for something.

She finds him in the kitchen one night, with a glass of cold water cradled against his chest, pleasantly cool against his flushed skin. A nightmare has pulled him out of his sleep; one about the walls of a trench tunnel collapsing and burying him alive, the wet soil filling his mouth and nose until his lungs implode. It’s been a recurring one; making Steve want to never close his eyes again.

He lets out a long breath, waiting for the galloping of his heartbeat to slow down.

The dream has left him too restless, his mind too wired to go back to sleep. It’s been getting worse lately, and it terrifies him beyond comprehension.

He senses Diana before he sees her, and when he looks up after a moment or two, she is crossing the kitchen, oddly pale in near-complete darkness. Her arms slide around him and she sighs sleepily into the back of his neck. She doesn’t ask and he wouldn’t know where to start even if he wanted to, but he sets the glass down on the counter when her grip tightens around him, grateful for her embrace.

“Come back to bed,” Diana murmurs.

“Just getting some water,” he says. A white lie that still leaves him with a twinge of guilt in his gut.

He turns around and steps back. His hand finds hers as he pulls her to the centre of the kitchen.

“Dance with me,” he asks, and the corners of her lips tug up, curving into a smile.

She shakes her head and rolls her eyes a little - _You’re crazy –_ but the tightness inside of him eases nonetheless. “There’s no music,” she points out, but her arms wind around his neck when Steve’s hands move around her body.

“Music’s overrated,” he huffs theatrically.

 _We can make our own_ , he thinks as he dips his head to rest his cheek to hers. They sway slowly in the pale moonlight streaming through the gap between the curtains, him stripped down to his boxers and her in his shirt, hanging loosely from her frame, the tiled floor cool beneath their bare feet.

Diana hums in approval when he brushes his mouth along her jaw and presses a kiss to the tender spot behind her ear. She murmurs something in a tongue he doesn’t recognize, the easy roll of syllables catching his attention, and his brows knit together.

“What did you say?”

 _“I love you,_ in Greek,” she whispers into his ear.

Steve pulls just far enough away to look at her, her smile soft and her face wonderfully content. Knowing that he’s the reason for that makes his stomach turn. Makes him lose the train of his thought for a moment. Makes him want to spend forever just looking at her, so beautiful it hurts.

She is a goddess, he reminds himself – something that hasn’t quite settled yet in his mind. A goddess and a princess of her people, and he is only a soldier lost in time who has found her amidst the chaos and carnage and destruction. And he wants to give her everything in this world and any other, if only she’d let him.

“Can you really say that in a hundred languages?” he asks, trying to ignore his rapid heartbeat and the heat rushing through his veins.

Diana smiles. “More.”

He tucks a piece of her hair around her ear, eyes roaming over her features.

An idea strikes him.

“Can you teach me?” he asks.

She does, and he learns to say _I love you_ in a hundred and seventeen ways, occasionally butchering the sounds on purpose to make Diana laugh. Sometimes, it is the one sound in all of creation that keeps him grounded and anchored right where he wants to be, and Steve learns to cherish those moments and hold on to them fiercely, with all his might.

* * *

Steve’s hands move expertly and deftly as he helps her peel her armour off her skin. He doesn’t ask where she has been and what has happened that has made her pull her sword out, and Diana doesn’t offer an explanation, not yet. 

He skims his fingers gently over the spots where the leather and metal have rubbed her skin raw – the marks that will be gone without a trace before she knows it. His touch is gentle, always so gentle with her even though he knows he needn’t be, that it makes Diana’s heartbeat trip over itself. It doesn’t linger though, moving on to the next clasp, next buckle.

“What do you think happened?” Steve asks with his eyes trained on her gauntlets, and Diana knows it’s not the events of her night that he is speaking about.

This is the first time he has broached the subject of his return in weeks, the two of them artfully dancing around it as if ignoring the elephant in the room would make it go away. Diana is no fool though, she can see that it has been eating him up on the inside, leaving him restless like a caged animal; leaving him looking over his shoulder as though something could drop from the sky and snatch him away.

For once, she can’t say that it won’t.

She pretends that she doesn’t notice. Pretends that she doesn’t notice the moments when he can barely look at her – just as he pretends not to hear the pauses before her responses and the way she sometimes can’t help but avert her own gaze as well. She pretends that the nights when he makes her forget her own name are the only things that truly matter and maybe they can live in the moment for as long as they breathe.

For years, she has been mad at her mother for keeping secrets from her, the truth about her father and how Diana came to be. The bitter feeling still sits heavily in her heart, the words she never got to say and likely never will. But what she does know is that the truth is not something one can walk away from once it’s out, and for the first time in her life, she is scared of it.

“We will find out,” she says quietly when he sets her gauntlets down, the leather straps she used to wrap around her hands coiled atop them. “Steve.”

He looks up at her.

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes.” His answer is immediate, unwavering. There is no hesitation in his voice.

She lifts her hand and touches his cheek, and he leans into her touch, pressing a kiss to the heel of her palm. “I will never let anything take you away from me,” she tells him, her voice decisive even though her insides are not. “Do you believe me?”

He nods but his eyes drop, his gaze wandering away.

He moves to her and presses a kiss to her forehead. She feels him loop a strand of her hair around her ear.

“Let’s get you something to eat,” he offers, brushing his thumb briefly to the ridge of her cheekbone.

Diana nods and pretends she hasn’t noticed that he never answered her question.

* * *

When the truth comes out, it knocks the ground from beneath her feet. Diana knows how to ask questions and where to look. She is good at what she does, always has been, but when she finds the answer she’s been searching for, she wants to start running in the opposite direction and never come back. It leaves her with a tight pain in her chest and her mind empty and numb.

To her memory, she has never felt trapped or helpless, so devoid of hope that it feels like her very being is shrouded in darkness, and she had long accepted that there isn’t much left in man’s world that can still surprise her. She was wrong. She is all of this now, caged and confused, and more.

So much more.

Diana has always known that Barbara Ann has been fascinated with the magic of her people from the start; the magic from a world different from her own, and she appreciated that interest, admired it even. But she never knew how far Barbara Ann would be willing to go to touch it, to feel its power for herself, and that was Diana’s mistake.

For decades, Diana has prayed for a miracle, for the grace of her gods and the mercy of her patrons. For a love born in the hopeless war to come back to her.

The truth is a lot less poetic and a lot more ironic than that. 

When Barbara Ann got tangled up with the old magic to make her wish come true, it had ripped the veil between their two worlds to shreds, letting things that didn’t belong in man’s world in. The cursed and the damned and the vengeful. Somewhere, something has gone terribly wrong and—

 _Steve_.

Diana presses her hand to her mouth, her eyes squeezed tight and her lungs folding in on themselves. 

She’s been searching for the truth to ease the pain of the unknown and lift that burden off of Steve’s chest. But when her mind settles, she wishes for nothing more than the safety of the oblivion and the bliss of ignorance to return. She can’t lose him, and she can’t save him, and there is nothing left for her other than to let the harsh reality tear her soul apart.

Old gods know no mercy. There is always a price to pay, and Diana has paid a dear one before, for peace and love and friendships. For everything she has had and everything she has lost. And in her search for solace, she has found devastation instead.

If she goes after Barbara Ann and patches up the tear between the two worlds, the natural order of things will be restored and Steve will be gone. He will be gone and it is not up to her to stop that. A daughter of god she may be, but there are laws the sharpness of her sword and the strength of her body mean nothing against.

* * *

She lays it out for Steve, and somehow her voice doesn’t quiver. It doesn’t break and betray her even as she watches his face turn to stone, his jaw set tautly against the bluntness of the truth he doesn’t want to hear. He doesn’t interrupt her once, and Diana’s heart bleeds in her chest from a need to reach for him. She doesn’t, fearing that he will flinch away from her. Or worse yet – that she will break into more pieces than she is made of from touching him.

When she falls silent, he nods once, and it is only then that she sees deep weariness in him.

He saw this coming, anticipated it even, she realizes, and her heart sinks. He has always known that this is how it will end for him. In the silence that falls between them, she can feel the storm brewing, ready to sweep in and fall upon them, merciless in its fury.

Yet, when Steve looks up at her, his expression is determined, unwavering.

“I’m coming with you,” he says quietly, his mind made up.

She snaps her head up. “No.”

“Diana…”

“She is my friend—”

“I know,” he says, completely misreading her tone, and she realizes that she had misread him too.

It is not only determination that she can see in his eyes, but defeat, too. So much of it that she wills herself to be outraged by how easily he wants to give up—she knows him better than that; she saw him stop at nothing to right the wrongs and bring the peace and do whatever needed to be done - yet all she can summon is anguish and despair.

“—but I just got you back,” she finishes.

This time, her voice breaks and it silences any protests ready to fall from his lips. She is staring at him from across the room, thinking that there is nothing she wouldn’t do to never know what she does. And the thought leaves her with the foul taste in her mouth. Leaves her feeling horrible and selfish and shameful, and by gods, she wants to be selfish. Wants to keep what’s rightfully hers. Just once, just this one time, she wants to hold on to something she loves and never let go.

They have both earned it.

“You can’t ask that of me,” Steve says, his voice hollow. “I’m not going to sit it out. This is my life on the line.”

Her expression hardens, the memories of another night flare up in her mind. The one that he took upon himself to end, leaving her alone with nothing but his watch and the memories that both healed and tormented her for years.

“Yes, and I watched you lose it once. You don’t know what it was like—”

“Because I was dead, Diana,” he interjects, his tone rising a notch. “I didn’t know what it was like for you to be left behind because I _couldn’t_.”

She recoils away from the finality and the harsh truth of his words.

“I cannot lose you again,” she repeats more forcefully. “I _won’t_.”

“What difference does it make?” he demands. “You said that once it’s over, I’ll be— _poof_!—gone. Just like that. It’s not your battle to fight.”

“Steve—”

“What difference does it make if I’m here or there?” he presses on, and this is when she sees raw anguish in his eyes. “We can’t do nothing. I can’t—I can’t do this… be here. Not at that cost. Not when—”

“We won’t. We will do something. I will… You have to trust me—”

“You said that there’s nothing that can be done,” he cuts her off, his voice slicing the air and the room between them in half. “You said that it was about the natural order of things, and I’m—” he grimaces. “I’m not.”

Diana watches the void open up between them, the two of them teetering on the edge, just barely holding on. It will consume them before it lets them live.

“Then what is this all about?” she demands. His brows knit into a frown, and she surges on before he can say a word. She gestures around them with the wide sweep of her hand. “Us… All this time, all those weeks—you think I couldn’t see it? That you’ve been waiting for this, that you’ve given up before we even tried. Everything you’ve said, the promises you’ve made… Was it all a lie?”

She sucks in a shaky breath, her vision blurring around the edges and Steve’s face a sharp contrast by comparison. She can’t stop now, not when they’ve gone so far. “Why live with me, be with me if you had no faith in us? Or was it mere convenience because you had nowhere else to go?”

Steve flinches as if she has slapped him, and Diana falls silent, hot shame at the unearned accusation rising inside of her, burning her face. That’s not what she meant, but it’s too late to take the words back. They hang between them, angry and ugly, and too full of truth.

“Steve—”

He raises his hand and shakes his head. “No, you’re right.”

She watches his shoulders slump, watches the colour drain from his face. He looks away from her, still stricken, and she can’t bear it. Yet, when she moves toward him, he steps away.

“You’re right,” he repeats, raising his gaze to hers. “I don’t know what it was like for you, to be alone. That one is on me.” His voice cracks and he swallows, hard. “And maybe I didn’t have the right to want to be with you as much as I do. As much as I always did. That one is on me, too.”

She doesn’t stop him when he leaves, half-expecting him to slam the door on the way out. He does not, and it’s the soft click of the lock as he closes it carefully behind him that has her face crumpling as tears come at last.

She cannot lose him again, but she feels that she already has.

* * *

He comes back late, and it isn’t until Diana hears the front door open and close that she realizes that some part of her expects him to disappear like he’s never been here at all. She hears it through the rusting of water in the shower, and the tight knot that her stomach has been coiled into ever since Steve has walked out of the apartment several hours ago unravels at last as relief fills her, almost too overwhelming to bear.

Yet, when she steps into the bedroom, it is dark. The bed is untouched, and there is no sign of him in the room too big for just her alone.

She follows the faint light of the desk lamp to the living room. From the hall, she spots Steve sitting on the couch, slumped forward with his forehead resting against the knot of his clasped hands. There is a weariness to him that she has never seen before, his despair nearly palpable in the air, although it is the spare pillow he must have grabbed from the bedroom while she was in the shower that makes her stomach turn cold.

Maybe it’s for the best, she thinks as she pauses in her tracks. It would be so easy to retreat where she has come from without Steve noticing her. Maybe some space would be good for them, she reasons. Headspace. Maybe they could—

She moves forward before she can stop herself.

“Steve.”

His head snaps up and he scrambles to his feet.

“Hey.”

Diana’s fingers curl around the doorjamb to keep her steady. She fears that nothing else will. A little more pressure, and the wood will snap in her grip.

“Why are you here?”

Her voice is small, and she never meant for it to be. She can’t stop the wrongness of it all from seeping into her bloodstream.

“I just—I thought maybe it’d be better—maybe you’d want…” he trails off.

His glance skitters around the room, pausing only briefly on the pillow before he looks at Diana again. He runs his hand over his hair, down his face.

There are deep, tired lines around his eyes as if he hasn’t slept since the night she watched him die. She doesn’t doubt that it feels that way to him, too. But there is no fight left in him, and her chest constricts with tenderness when she sees the sorrow in his eyes.

When Diana crosses the room, he doesn’t step away. Doesn’t move when her palms slide over his chest, her fingers curling over his shirt as she bridges what little space is still left between them, and he reaches for her too, his hands curling over her hips.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. In the stillness and semi-darkness of the room, her voice doesn’t seem to be able to find itself. “What I said earlier…” She touches his hair near his temple, her fingers skimming over his jaw. “I crossed a line I had no right to cross. There is no excuse for it.”

“Diana, I would never—”

“I know.” Her hands frame his face, her thumb absently stroking his cheek as Steve ducks his head closer to her until his forehead is pressed against hers. “I know, love.”

He smells of snow. Of snow and Steve and, oddly, thick wool and the jet fuel that filled the cold air of the airfield decades ago as the war raged around them, merciless and cruel. And it is like she is saying the goodbye she has already said once before all over again, and her throat is so tight she can barely breathe. 

Steve’s hands run over her arms. She can feel him relax, can feel the tension seep out of his body when she touches him.

“I didn’t know if you’d be back,” she confesses.

His expression grows pained. “Diana…”

“I will not lose you again,” she promises softly before he says anything else. “There is nothing in this world or any other that can take you away from me.”

Her thumb traces along his bottom lip, over the prickly stubble on his chin.

He is a good man, and there is nothing he can do to make her feel otherwise. He is good and brave and kind. The kind of man who won’t hesitate to do the right thing even if it breaks him in half, and she loves him even more for it. Loves him for everything that he doesn’t even know he is. Even the things that he deeply despises himself for. Those that he won’t let her see.

“I don’t know how to do this,” Steve breathes out. She watches his eyes flutter shut.

She has never seen him so worn, so exhausted. And she doesn’t understand, either. For once in her life, Diana doesn’t understand the twisted game of fate, and the cruelty behind it. She has watched mankind tear itself apart time and time again, sometimes for a reason, often without, but she cannot accept this. She cannot accept letting go of him again.

There are only so many times one’s heart can break before the broken pieces stop fitting back together.

She cannot lose him again, but she doesn’t know how not to.

Diana pushes his hair back from his face, and Steve leans into her touch.

“You are going,” he says, opening his eyes.

“I am.”

He nods but doesn’t argue, although she can’t tell if it’s because he has found peace with her decision, or because he doesn’t have it in him anymore to fight against it. It’s not about words, Diana realizes. Not the arguments or facts, but about acceptance, and she doesn’t think it will ever come.

And she vows to herself that they will have a chance to figure it out. That they will have more time.

“You don’t have to sleep here,” she murmurs.

Steve shakes his head. “Here’s okay,” he mutters, breaking eye contact.

“Alright.” Diana doesn’t object. “We can stay here.”

He looks up. She watches his eyes turn dark as understanding clicks, his brief confusion turning into need.

She doesn’t stop him when his hands push into her hair, tilt her face up, when he kisses her with such hunger it makes her shiver. There is reverence in his voice when he says her name, and it makes her chest ache. She doesn’t remember which one of them moves first or how they end up on the couch, her in his lap and his hands moving over her body with frantic urgency that speaks of the need to make each moment count when they might have so few of them left. None of that stays.

But she remembers tugging at his shirt to pull it off; remembers his hands sliding over her skin; remembers Steve saying that he loves her in more languages than she can count.

And then she stops counting.

(“I told you we should have moved to the bedroom,” Diana tells him after, half-laughing.

The couch is a tight fit, too small and too narrow for the two of them, but she doesn’t mind. She craves his closeness and the warmth of his body pressed to every inch of her, and his fingers move idly over her skin, through her hair, their legs tangled together. And for a moment, just a brief one, everything feels like it’s exactly the way it’s meant to be.

Steve chuckles. He pulls the quilt over them and cradles her to him, so close that Diana can feel his heartbeat like it’s her own.

“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” he mutters, sated and drowsy, as he tucks his face into the curve of her neck.

She wraps her arms around him and kisses his hair, but even in the haze of giddy, delirious happiness, she dreams of the plane engulfed in flames when she sleeps.)

* * *

“Let me come,” Steve tries once again as Diana puts on her armour to go and fix the world again.

There is no point, they have exhausted all arguments already, but there is not much else he can do. Nothing else he can say.

Diana shakes her head without looking at him. Steve doesn’t press. She picks up her sword and her shield, and at that moment, it is hard to doubt that she will come back victorious. She always has before.

Aside from the one time when the victory came at the price of his life.

They don’t say goodbye when she leaves. No big words or loud proclamations to be remembered if this is the last time they see each other. No promises they know they cannot keep, and Steve is both grateful and unsettled by it – he has missed his chance once already. Instead, there is silence and his eyes searching her face, and he can’t help but move forward and trace his thumb along her cheekbone.

“Be safe,” he says quietly.

Diana leans forward and kisses his cheek. Her touch lingers for a moment longer than is called for, and he is grateful for it.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” she tells him, and he almost believes her.

He follows her. Of course, he does, because it’s his life, but more than that – because he can’t stand waiting, trapped in the four walls. Can’t stand having her deal with the mess she hasn’t started and shouldn’t have to clean up. And he hopes against all hope that she will fail. For once, he wants her to lose the battle so he can stay. So he can wake up every morning next to her and have the future stretch out before them. Anything, just so he won’t lose her all over again.

He follows her, keeping a safe distance even though he is half-certain that she is aware of his presence. He is a good spy, he can hide and blend in and get lost where no one will look for him, but Diana has hundreds of years of training on him. She has instincts that he’ll never match, not even if he got to live for a million years. They circle around and backtrack and move forward, and he wonders if she is nervous. If she is scared. If she is as lonely as he is.

He follows her to London, and then the Middle East, repeating the path that Barbara Ann took several weeks ago…

And then he turns back. If he is to turn to dust at the snap of someone’s fingers, Steve doesn’t want it to happen in a dingy rented room in the part of town where no one asks questions, hiding from the woman he loves. There is no good way to die, that much he is sure of, but this might be the worst of them all.

Washington greets him with more snow, and he can’t help but feel like they are going to be buried and lost without a trace before the warmth has a chance to save them. If he is lucky, maybe the gods that will come to claim his soul won’t find their way.

The apartment is oddly big without Diana. Until now, he never realized how much space her very presence was taking. Now the emptiness bounces off the walls and echoes in the corners filled with voices he can’t bear to hear. They are pressing down on him, growing louder with each passing moment.

He shakes his head and lets them fade into nothing. If he is to get crossed out of existence tomorrow, he’d rather it be here, in the place where he was happy, for however brief a time.

He sleeps on sheets that smell of Diana, and he dreams of the future he knows he cannot have.

* * *

When Diana returns to Washington, the snow is melting.

The apartment is quiet and empty when she walks in, and so still in the morning light that even her breathing grows shallow for fear of disturbing it. She looks around, taking note of the coffee cup on the table, the clock ticking softly on the wall, the sunlight filtering through the lace curtains in an intricate pattern.

She steps inside and closes the door behind her.

“Steve?”

His sweater is draped over the back of the chair. Exactly where it was the day she left. His shoes are sitting on the rack in the hallway. Small things she has gotten used to, but there is no sign of him now. Diana doesn’t need to check the date on the newspaper left on the couch to know that it is weeks old.

She turns around, slowly, and takes in the place that has been her home for a few years now as if seeing it for the first time. The ghost of Steve is all around her – cooking breakfast, sprawled on the couch, fixing the creaky hinges on the bathroom door, asleep in her arms with the sheets tangled around them. His smile, his laughter, the way he would say her name – a little breathless, a little surprised that he is lucky to be allowed to.

The memories are everywhere, and the weight of them is pushing her down to her knees.

Diana walks over to the coat rack and presses her face into his jacket, breathing him in as her fingers curl over the sleeve. The tears burn her eyes, and she swallows.

She bargained and pleaded and threatened, and she never, not for one moment thought that she would fail. That he would return to her only to leave her again where she couldn’t follow.

 _Please, forgive me_.

She picks up a framed photograph, not perfect but dear to her heart and traces her finger over the shape of him, his head turned and his eyes on her.

Her head snaps up at the sound of the lock clicking open, the slight creak of the door.

She stares as Steve walks in, a paper bag of groceries sitting in the crook of his elbow and a week-old stubble coating his cheeks and dribbling onto his neck. He pauses, as surprised to see her as Diana is to see him, the sunlight tangled in his hair making it look golden. 

She stares, feeling the world swim around her, oddly out of focus because for a moment—for a cruel and unfair moment—she can’t help but think that she is imagining him.

And then he smiles—with his whole face and his eyes crinkling at the corners, impossibly blue—and her stomach lurches at the brilliance of it. At the easy dimple and the lines that spring around his mouth.

“Diana.”

She drops the frame she’s been holding and the glass shatters at her feet.

“Didn’t know you’d be coming back today,” he says softly, and she lunges toward him, his name falling from her lips in half-sob because she fears that he might disappear.

“Hey, those were the eggs,” he mutters when the paper bag falls out of his grip and hits the floor with the familiar crunch, but there is a smile in his voice and his arms catch her, hold her, solid and real.

“Steve,” Diana breathes out.

He pulls back, and she doesn’t realize that there are tears that have started to fall from her eyes until he lifts his hand to wipe the wetness from her cheekbone with his thumb.

“They were just eggs, you know. Nothing to cry about,” he says, and she laughs—a watery sound that makes his own smile widen, blue eyes filled with joy.

And then she kisses him, her hands holding his face. It is chaste and breathless and awkward, and nothing like what she’d imagined it would be before she walked through the door.

It’s better.

**Author's Note:**

> Welp, this movie was... something else, right?
> 
> Thanks for making it to the end :) Feedback is always much appreciated!  
> Also many, many thanks go to **akajb** for betaing and being the best! 
> 
> And feel free to share your opinions and thoughts on WW84! I'm also on [Tumblr](https://hiraeth-doux.tumblr.com/), feel free to say hi :)


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